The Best Films of 2024

Slim pickings I fear...

In the introduction to yesterday’s ‘Worst Of’ list, I briefly touched on the ways in which ‘Hollywood incompetence’ has begun to trickle down and seriously effect independent and arthouse cinema. There are a lot of factors to blame for this— budget constraints and guys dying/retiring without passing knowledge on on means that a lot of stuff (long lens close-ups, high contrast chiaroscuro lighting, how to actually shoot/animate animatronic puppets,) is slowly disappearing from the cinematic lexicon of directors and DPs and being replaced by pastiche and shibboleth. A generation of filmmakers raised on clumsy secondhand understandings of identity and representation are now coming into their own, making clumsy didactic pictures with clumsy attempts at provocation or thematic depth, which are in turn lauded by audiences who don’t even know the Vampire Castle has an exit, much less how to reach it.

The motion picture industry is in dire straits and my own cynicism, left unchecked to run rampant across all of my critical faculties, has left me rudderless and adrift. I was disappointed by basically everything I had been hotly anticipating for over a year, and much of what I saw with low/no expectations still failed to meet them. I liked plenty of stuff, but I can’t remember a year where I loved less films. That said, the ones that made the cut are all beautiful, excellent movies.

Here are the best films of 2024.

Honorable Mentions

Rap World by Connor O’Malley and Danny Scharar is a strange triumph, less a motion picture than it is a wholly successful experiment in in living history. Challengers prompted me to hit my weed pen in the theater at the hour mark. Anora is the closest Sean Baker has come to synthesizing the films he wants to make (Star 80, The Heartbreak Kid) and what audiences ask of him (Sundance Labs pablum). Pushpa 2: The Rule wastes FaFa and makes absolutely no sense, but is the most MAAASSS thing i’ve seen, maybe ever, and “International Star Icon” Allu Arjun turns in a magnetic performance worth of that title. April by Dea Kulumbegashvili is a harrowing work from a master formalist that is unfortunately hampered by an experimental break from reality that doesn’t work. The Suit by Hans Emigholz is a grueling exercise in marrying the styles of Damon Packard and Neil Breen with that of Harun Farocki or Straub/Huillet. Rebel Ridge by Jeremy Saulnier is too boring to merit inclusion on this list but it filled me with joy to see a DTV action programmer directed by a socialist who isn’t a moron. Terrifier 3 by Damien Leone has high highs and low lows and would’ve probably just cracked the top ten but for…

In A Violent Nature (Chris Nash)

In an era where “Experimental Horror” is a term usually applied to films that allegedly contain “themes” or “good cinematography,” Chris Nash’s ‘slow cinema slasher’ is genuinely experimental and a breath of fresh air in the ever-crowded space of low budget, shot-on-digital golden age slasher reworks. The film is a classic ‘80s slasher told from the perspective of a silent killer, raised from the dead, as he trudges through the woods to kill horny teenagers in gruesome and sadistic ways. It’s so truly refreshing to see a horror film with arthouse influences that is largely uninterested in themes around grief or trauma or blah blah blah, instead favoring formalist deconstructions of genre conventions and satisfying the true horror-homer’s lust for blood, guts, and novel violence through gorgeous long-take compositions.

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes (Wes Ball)

The Apes reboot series has been a consistent bright spot in the Hollywood blockbuster space for over a decade. Wes Ball’s latest entry, set an indeterminate number of decades after Matt Reeves’s War For The Planet Of The Apes, finally gives us a look at, well, a planet of the apes— ape society, ape religion, ape engineering. This shit is awesome, and I would probably love it even if the movie was stupid, but Josh Friedman’s tight and intelligent script, incredible performances from Owen Teague and Kevin Durand, and the best VFX of the year put Kingdom in the same conversation as Avatar or The Lord Of The Rings.

Conclave (Edward Berger)

A hammy masterpiece directed with blistering gravitas. I want a hundred sequels to this stupid movie where Detective John Conclave (Ralph Fiennes) has to solve different mysteries in the Vatican. That would be awesome to me.

Civil War (Alex Garland)

Hey, you self-serious dipshit! Have you seen this guy talk on TV or on X, the Everything App?

What more do you want than to see a White House Press Secretary get shot dropped by two .556 FMJ rounds to the chest in the center of the White House Briefing Room?¹ Civil War caused a (mostly negative) stir when it was released, I think mostly because people didn’t get that it’s an action movie with good action and striking images, which is what I want when I see an action film. If you got upset by the incoherent political messaging or “unrealistic characters” (please), I hope you bring that same loser energy when you’re watching John Wick 2 or Mission Impossible: Fallout.

Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari)

This adaptation of a (very excellent) novel by Jim Crace is one of the best looking, best sounding, best feeling films of the year. Cutesy anachronism often rubs me the wrong way, but Tsangari, along with costumer Kirsty Halliday, production designer Nathan Parker, and DP Sean Price Williams, managed to craft a world that feels both wholly unstuck from time and completely evocative of the early 17th century. A tale of inclosure, both literal and figurative, Harvest highlights both the ways in which “the past is a foreign country” and the ways in which “the past isn’t even past.”

Ovid, New York (Vito A. Rowlands)

Ovid, New York is fetish-forward filmmaking where the look and feel of the film, the gear being used, is what drives everything else. This sounds derogatory, but it’s actually one of my favorite modes of cinema— hauntology (take a shot) as an actual discipline rather than a post-reflective descriptor, like Bujalski’s Computer Chess or Jenkin’s Bait and Enys Men, which are some of the best films of the last several years. This is such a difficult tightrope to walk. It’s easy to fall into traps like rounding the corners of your frame, either in post or by virtue of not cropping your scans (think of Rohrwacher’s La Chimera from last year, or Pálmason’s Nest from 2022) and add a near-insurmountable precociousness, or to fall so far into your own fetishes and predilections that you don’t have anything left for them to drive (Luz by Tilman Singer). In order for something like this to work, you have to have a meticulous attention to detail and, perhaps most elusively, very, very, very good taste. Rowlands’s film has all of this in spades, brimming with a sort of gentle-yet-cocksure confidence in craft and subject matter that pays enormous dividends to the viewer, with residuals down the line every time it pops into your head.

TRAP (M. Night Shyamalan)

This is easily the best film ever made that features the ultimate coworker-rapper Russ as “Parker Wayne.” Shyamalan is a fascinating director, a humble workman-auteur whose penchant for populist surrealism is unlike anything else in cinema, and TRAP is a masterpiece of his impossible-to-replicate middle period style. A perfect dialectic between “le random” vibes and meticulous locking in— thrilling, JBOL, and thrillingly JBOL.

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

Every blurb or review of this film begins by hitting the same notes: Mike Leigh has reunited with Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Mike Leigh has returned to a contemporary working class British Milieu for the first time in over a decade. Mike Leigh has finally made another film after six years of struggling to come up with funding. The reason these beats bare repeating again and again is because, for anyone even remotely familiar with the titanic oeuvre of Britain’s premiere social realist, you don’t need to know anything else to be sold on the film. His ‘return to form’ (a convenient, if not entirely accurate descriptor) in Hard Truths feels like neither an evolution nor a stagnation, but neither is required of him, because every film he has ever directed feels unique to itself, because every human being is unique to themselves, and no one can, or will ever, capture that better than Mike Leigh.

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

Nickel Boys is a marvelous thing to experience. I will never forget the way the film’s risky formal gimmick (the film is shot entirely in first person) slowly won me over, condensing a century of (film, Black, American) history into 140 minutes of tactile, experiential filmmaking the likes of which I’d never really seen before. Ross is naked with his influences— the presence of Kevin Jerome Everson and Stan Brakhage loom large in the film’s moments of interstitial montage, and the tasteful, clever blurring of real and prop historical artifacts presented on screen bring to mind the more academically-minded works of Harun Farocki— but it never feels like the mere sum of it’s parts, nor an extended formal exercise. Instead, Nickel Boys manages something impossible, foregrounding a gimmick so thoroughly it is impossible to ignore without ceding any emotional ground to its self-imposed formal restrictions.

Caught By The Tides (Jia Zhangke)

Jia Zhangke’s latest is a miracle, and the best film of the year. Compiled together out of newly shot material, and outtakes and vérité footage captured across twenty years of filmmaking, the film is neither documentary nor a narrative feature, but rather a completely transportive tapestry of all the different truths and lies the cinematic medium is able to offer. It is tragic, it is very funny, it is startlingly intimate and massive in its scope. Caught By The Tides is the story of a woman’s life over two decades; it is the story of China’s second wave of industrialization that lifted millions out of poverty and while scarring the physical and psychic landscape of the nation; it is a film about what it means to make films, about going to the club and why it is (and isn’t) important to dance and share music with the world around you, and it is a film about what it means (and what it feels like) to be madly in love with your beautiful wife.

When I saw the film, a woman in front of me spent the entire runtime texting on WhatsApp. Instead of being irritated, as I usually am when a phone is out for the duration of a film, I was captured by the romantic possibilities it entailed: Maybe she’s texting a lover who in a distant time zone, about to fall asleep. Maybe a relative or dear friend is undergoing a medical crisis, and she is receiving updates and offering wishes of safety and speedy recovery. When I stepped out of the theater, I felt like I was levitating. The fresh chill of late autumn, a bitter annoyance on my walk to the theater, was now refreshing and full of possibilities.

The best films, be they grim domestic dramas, dumb action flicks, gross-out horror movies, or avant-garde documentaries about or photographs of Auschwitz, or rocks and minerals, will fill you with a lust for life and a renewed appreciation for all that is around you. The experiencing of a very good piece of art is revitalizing and necessary, and in 2024, I never felt the healing, expanding effects of cinema more sharply than when I saw Caught By The Tides.

1. in minecraft or w/e